Alternative DVD Reviews

The story of nine-year-old Amudha’s discovery that she is adopted and her search for her biological parents in war-torn Sri Lanka. Amudha’s adopted family are well-to-do liberal intellectuals living in India but they drop everything to accompany her on her search. The film is presented in the traditional Bollywood format of a musical designed to entertain a vast public. As such, it uses the magic of song and dance to provide a feast of colour and rhythm where the senses can rest while the story unfolds – and, in this case, they are the best that a big budget can buy. Lush cinematography and panoramic camerawork compliment the amazing work of Keerthana, the spirited child actress who plays Amudha.

Why It Matters: This film explores a poignant and explosive story whose themes of adoption and war are not uncommon around our world. As such, it is a showcase for Tamil director Mani Ratnam’s ability to unfold personal intimate stories into vast panoramic epics that bridge the gap between serious “art” and popular “commercial” entertainment – and it’s not often that you can see both in one film!...

A devastating documentary that examines the cases of seven men wrongly convicted of murder and rape, but exonerated many years later by the admission of DNA evidence into the courts. The filmmaker follows the men through the difficulties they encounter in overturning their convictions, their release and their ensuing struggles to transition back into society.

Why It Matters: A film confirms many of our worst fears about the American criminal-justice system. Imagine how you would feel if the best years – possibly even decades – of your life had been lost to a wrongful conviction. Especially when research now points to mistaken identity as the most common factor leading to a wrongful conviction – even the most positive of eye-witnesses can be wrong. The physical and psychological toll on a person unjustly imprisoned for decades is staggering. But here, the bitterness, despair and even rage that you might expect is tempered by a sense of gratitude resulting from the seemingly miraculous. This is a film you should not miss....

Gou-ichi Takata, a taciturn fisherman from a remote Japanese fishing village, has always had trouble communicating emotions and has been estranged from his son, Ken-ichi for many years. When his daughter-in-law, Rie, calls from Tokyo to say that Ken has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Takata immediately hastens to his son’s bedside – but Ken refuses to see him. Rie, hoping to give the older man a glimpse into his son’s life and work, gives him a rough-cut of a documentary about rural Chinese folk opera that Ken was working on. Feeling that he cannot repair their relationship karma in person, Takata decides on an alternative: he will go to Yunnan and complete his son's film.

Why It Matters: This is the perfect story of a taciturn, unforgiving father whose last minute realization of just what his estrangement from his son really means sets him on an odyssey of discovery in which the goodness of others becomes his own path to awakening. In the course of his journey to the remote Chinese province of Yunnan, Takata encounters many obstacles and twists of fate that are often humorous as well as instructive, and work together to bring him closer to an understanding of both himself and of his son. Having found the gateway to the appreciation of goodness in both himself and others the lonely old man becomes grateful for all those who have helped him along the “thousands of miles” of his journey....

A perfectly realistic fantasy that explores the relationship of the dream world to our everyday logical existence. The starting point is the inner world of Stephane, a young man who arrives in Paris from Mexico to stay with his recently widowed mother and falls inlove with the charming Stephanie. Adrift between the worlds of waking and sleeping, their awkward flirtation produces no logical story-line, an approach that may be the only way in which to tell a love story, a narrative made up of memories, fantasies, projections and misperceptions whose cohesion does not conform to any conventional structure.

Why It Matters: This is a movie that uses dreams to explore how our minds work in relationships. Stephane believes he has found a kindred spirit who shares the same world he does, but is this a love story of two people or of one? The fugitive, ephemeral quality of the dream-world is hard to remember, and so the story that seemed so clear in sleep, now seems labyrinthine in the clear light of day. This film is beautiful, complex and often humorous, but like others of this genre (Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, for example) you may want to see it more than once....